January 24, 2006

Blawgs, phonolawgically speaking

Mark Liberman commented last
week on some complaints lodged against the neologism blawg, meaning 'a law-related blog.'
David Giacalone of f/k/a
dismissed the term as "an insider pun by a popular lawyer-webdiva
(which should have been passed around and admired briefly as a witty
one-off)." (The lawyer-webdiva in question, by the way, is Denise
Howell of Bag and Baggage,
who began keeping a "blawg roll" in early March 2002.
An article in Legal Times
gives Howell sole credit for the coinage.)

Mark noted that blawg is
"an unusual sort of portmanteau word"
— unusual in that "the sound of one of the words (law) is completely contained within
the sound of the other word (blog)."
I'd agree that the blending of law
and blog into blawg is a peculiar formation (even
for a "witty one-off"), but not simply because one of the words is
phonologically contained within the other.

First, let's consider the structural possibilities for "blends" or
"portmanteaus" — words that combine two or more forms, with at least
one of the forms getting shortened in the process. In "Blends, a
Structural and Systemic View" (American
Speech 52:1/2, Spring 1977, pp. 47-64), John Algeo discerns three main categories of lexical blending:

For all three types of blending, the majority of items combine their
components sequentially: a segment of the first word is followed by a
segment of second word, with possible overlapping between the two
segments. But Algeo notes that blending sometimes occurs through the
insertion of one form into another, again with possible overlapping of
segments. Following the
terminology of Harold Wentworth, Algeo dubs such inserted blends
"sandwich words." Note that sandwich words, like other blends, still
require that at least one form is shortened in the process of
combination; if there's no shortening then it's simply a case of
infixation, like fanfriggintastic
(expletive infixation) or scrumdiddlyumptious ("diddly" infixation with partial reduplication).

Here
are examples of sandwich words given by Algeo to fit each of his three
categories:

Though two of Lewis Carroll's classic portmanteaus — chortle and slithy — are represented among
Algeo's sandwich words, most are what Giacalone would call "witty
one-offs," or what linguists call nonce formations. Thus we have autobydography 'an autobiography
written by a dog,' in-sin-uation
'the insinuation of sin,' miscevarsitation
'marriage between attendants of different colleges,' and ambisextrous 'sexually
ambidextrous.' (Michael Quinion
notes that ambisextrous is
not so nonce, as it dates
from 1929 and "has achieved a modest continuing circulation.")

Every generation seems to create its own sandwich words, but we are
blessed (and cursed) to live in an era where every nonce formation is
likely to be recorded on some website somewhere, occasionally gathered
up in such repositories of fleeting usage as Urban Dictionary, Langmaker, or
most recently Merriam-Webster's
Open Dictionary. (Such collaborative enterprises tend to be utterly
chaotic, as opposed to the more methodical cataloguing of innovative
forms by Grant Barrett at Double-Tongued
Word Wrester or Mark Peters at Wordlustitude.) It's easy
enough to find latter-day sandwich words on these sites, e.g.: satiscraptory = satisfactory + crap, fantASStic = fantastic + ass, and specyackular
= spectacular + yack. Elsewhere one can find
sandwich words of a less profane nature, e.g.: specTECHular = spectacular + tech, fan-Kaz-tic = fantastic + Kaz (i.e., the baseball player Kaz
Matsui), and ter-RIF-fic
= terrific + RIF ("Reading is Fundamental").

Certain words seem to lend themselves to sandwich blending. Once ridonkulous
and other silly variants of ridiculous
began to spread several years ago, the word ridiculous
became a prime target for nonce sandwich blends. Urban
Dictionary is full of examples like redorkulous,
redrunkulous,
reboozulous,
and recrunkulous
(in these cases, the blending has led to a reanalysis of the first
syllable as re-). In
fact, ridonkulous itself has
been interpreted
as a blend of ridiculous and
donk(ey), though this strikes
me
as an ex post facto rationalization. Another popular target among
left-leaning Netizens is the word Republican,
which gets the sandwich treatment in such epithets as Rethuglican, Resmuglican, Repiglican, Redumblican, Rebooblican, Reporklican, Repooplican, Reputzlican, Repukelican, etc., etc.

The recipe for such sandwich words is pretty constant: take a
polysyllabic word and replace the primarily-stressed syllable with a
punchy monosyllabic word of your choice. It's clear, however, that blawg is a different beast,
morphophonologically speaking. Denise Howell took a monosyllabic word (blog) and inserted another
monosyllable (law), such that
the "bread" for the sandwich consists merely of one initial consonant (b-) and one final consonant (-g). I know of no other sandwich
word so dominated by its filling.

What's more, the two component words are maximally overlapping for
some
speakers and nearly so for others. For speakers with the cot-caught merger of low back
vowels (such as most residents of the western
U.S.), the vowel in blog
merges with the vowel in law,
with the result that blawg is
homonymous with blog.
Speakers
without the merger tend to use the cot
vowel for most words ending in -og,
with the exception of dog and
occasionally other common words. Blog
is not (yet!) common enough to be subject to this lexical diffusion and
thus remains distinct from blawg
for most speakers lacking the merger.

The low back merger is clearly a point of confusion in the blawg wars. The editor of Blawg
Review evidently has the merger and doesn't seem to be aware that
others might not:

Interestingly, the word blawg is
pronounced the same as the word blog,
so there is absolutely no confusion in oral communication. In the
written word, blawg is easily
intelligible and conveys additional
meaning to readers and to search engines.

Conversely, David
Giacalone doesn't have the merger and expressed shock that there
are those who do:

Frankly, I was surprised to read that you
pronounce "blog" and
"blawg" in the same way... That underscores the notion that the word is
just an insider gimmick, because the two words don't
need to be homophones. Merriam-Webster online, for example, does not
pronounce "blog" in a manner that makes it homophonic with "blawg." ...
I believe most "blawgers" pronounce the words blawg and blog
differently -- otherwise, making the distinction seems pointless. If
one has to pronounce them the same way for the uninitiated to
understand what you are talking about, you are making my confusion
argument for me.

Both sides of this argument seem odd to me. The Blawg Review editor
presents it as a virtue that blog
and blawg are pronounced
the same (for everyone, he thinks). I'd have guessed that this would be a
strike against blawg,
since the distinction with blog becomes
difficult to make in spoken interaction, potentially leading to more
confusion, not less. (Indeed, Giacalone links
to a post by Trevor Hill,
who also has the merger, but sees it as a drawback to blawg: "it's homophonous
with blog, making it
useless in actual English speech.")

On the other hand, I don't
think that the presence of the low back merger for some speakers
renders the blog-blawg distinction
"pointless," as Giacalone would have it. It would simply make blawg a sandwich blend with maximal
overlap, like in-sin-uation, fantASStic, ter-RIF-fic, or ri-dick-ulous. True, the punniness
of those polysyllabic blends can be driven home by exaggerating
the stress on the inserted segment, a prosodic device that isn't
available for blawg (unless a
peculiar contrastive pronunciation developed, like "buh-LAW-guh").
But blawg has been doing
just fine as a visual blend, regardless of whether readers think it's pronounced the same as blog
or not. Since the term has thus far existed primarily in online
interaction in the blawgosphere, complaining about its potential
pronunciation makes about as much sense as complaining about the
typographical conventions of l33t. But if blawg really does start taking
off in spoken discourse, it will be interesting to see if these
arguments over the word's pronunciation become intensified.

A companion to the phonological argument over blawg
is the aesthetic one. Hill thinks the word "looks ugly," and Giacalone
is troubled by the similarity to dawg
as eye dialect for dog. (I
say eye dialect
because, as I mentioned, even speakers lacking the low back merger tend
to use the caught vowel for dog. But dawg may also represent a pronunciation spelling if
it represents an exaggerated pronunciation of the vowel; cf., rock vs. rawk.) Giacalone writes:

Most members of the public are far more likely
to think its a
take-off on the incredibly overused "dawg" for dog, rather than a
reference to law-related weblogs. Insiders know what it is,
outsiders do not and are very likely to view it as adolescent jargon.

Personally, I think most "outsiders" are perceptive enough to
avoid seeing blawg as merely
"adolescent jargon." Surely context is key. I can't imagine many
readers would have difficulty distinguishing between, say,
"Blawgs can be used for practitioners to give information about what is
happening in his/her area" on the one hand, and "Kewl blawg, dood!" on
the other. And if there are any concerns about misconstrual, one can
always opt for the more orthographically distinct bLAWg. Aesthetically, though, that's pretty darn odd-looking.

[Update #1: On a side note, Karen Davis emails to comment on the awkwardness of the above quote from the Maryland Bar Bulletin: "Blawgs can be used for practitioners to give information about what is happening in his/her area." As Karen notes, the writer "puts 'practitioner' in the plural and then *still* uses the clunky "his/her" instead of the natural — and totally permissible — 'their.'" I suspect this is simply an editing error, since the previous sentence uses the singular "practitioner." Or perhaps it's a case of pronominal hypercorrection brought upon by an aversion to singular they.]

A data point -- I come from DeKalb, IL, just above the Northern/Midland
isogloss, and have distinguished between 'cot' and 'caught' all my life.
Indeed, my surname constitutes a test case, since to me it rhymes with
'caller', 'taller', and 'hauler' but *not* with
'collar', 'dollar', or 'holler'.

However, *I* pronounce *both* 'log' and 'blog'
(as well as 'dog', 'hog', 'fog', 'frog', 'smog', and 'bog')
with the same vowel as 'caught' (open O), and *never* with /a/.

By contrast, I *always* have /a/ in 'cog', and I'm ambivocalic
with 'slog', 'sog(gy)', 'tog(gle)', and 'trog(lodyte)'.

So 'blog' and 'blawg' do mean the same thing for me, and in
fact when I first saw 'blawg' I assumed it was just an
eye dialect spelling of 'blog', just as 'dawg' is of 'dog'.

I guess the moral is that Paper's Law [1] applies here.

[1] Named after my former colleague Herb Paper, the law is
succinctly stated as "It's not that simple". ]